DaveAgain wrote:It's not just vocabulary.golyplot wrote:I think perhaps part of it is that English has a vast amount of obscure and archaic vocabulary, which native speakers pick up over time, but which isn't necessary for every day usage.
If I read something from the 19th century, I almost always encounter unfamiliar words, and I did a lot of reading as a kid (estimated vocabulary of 33k according to testyourvocab). The fantasy genre is also notorious for using words that are no longer in common usage in order to sound cool (which often leads to a revival in those words).
In Part 4: What Everyone Should Know about Second Language Acquisition (7mins into video), the speaker gives an example from spanish where understanding of a particular sentence structure differs between native speakers over/under 14 years old.
Maybe. I would argue that this might not not really be a case of not understanding a particular sentence structure. If native adults go about 50/50, then it follows that both interpretations of this sentence structure are possible out of context. The question then becomes why the speaker is adding the optional overt subject in a particular context, (one possibility being to signal that the antecedent is not the subject of the main clause). For me this is pragmatics and there's nothing particularly surprising that even natives have to be teenagers to start to figure this out, because that is when most people start to get quite proficient at figuring out other people's intentions and stuff. It doesn't necessarily imply that it takes a long time to master the actual language point (although it might).
Interestingly IIRC written Spanish has devices to avoid this kind of unclear antecedent when necessary (e.g. éste and ése). I wonder why they are not often used in in informal speech. Thinking out loud, could it maybe be because these pronouns are also used colloquially (at least in Spain) to refer to someone in a disparaging manner? I remember a Spanish person being quite surprised when I showed him textbooks teaching "éste es el señor..." for "this is Mr...", advising me not to say this, because (while grammatically correct) it is quite disrespectful.